Fragments of Frankliniana: The Conservation of Arctic Exploration-Related Paper

Abstract

Most of the paper retrieved from the Arctic has been from sites where cairns were erected or where caches of stores were deposited by nineteenth and early twentieth century explorers. This article describes the investigation and conservation treatment of the contents of one artifact, a metal canister, left in the Canadian Arctic as early as 1850 by parties in search of the missing Franklin Expedition. Retrieved from an Arctic island beach one hundred years later, it was deposited with not one, but two Canadian national collecting institutions. Having rested mostly unexamined for over fifty years, preparations for the exhibition Death in the Ice, The Mystery of the Franklin Expedition in 2015 renewed interest in the artifact and its contents, now known to have been the subject of multiple relocations and rediscoveries in the realms of not only Arctic exploration but also museum and archives practice.